Just thought I'd add to / play devil's advocate with a few of the responses in this thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chadfrom308
-Floor pick up is not that important. The good teams in the 2011 season and 2013 season never picked up from the floor
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Lots of people piled on to this response, probably going a bit too far. The way you wrote this it's not factually correct or great advice. Almost every competitive team in 2011 had a floor loader. This isn't to say that a simpler robot that did not pick up off the floor couldn't be effective. In fact, one of them, 1503, was extremely effective.
In 2013, you *definitely* didn't need a floor loader to be competitive. Many of the best teams didn't have one.
A good takeaway from this should be "Game tasks are far less essential than you think they are." There are very few tasks that a robot MUST do to be competitive. Don't fall into the trap of "if we want to keep up with team XXXX, we have to climb / floor load / whatever"
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pault
In 2013, ~50% of the top tier teams had floor pickups, as opposed to the ~5% of all teams that had one.
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Be weary of conflating correlation with causation here. The implication here is that the top teams picked up off the floor primarily, which just isn't true.
Using Top 25 as a proxy for "top tier teams", only 9 or 10 of them had a floor pickup that was used extensively in teleop. Another 5 or 6 had pickups almost exclusively used in autonomous mode. Of the top 25, 18-19 of them used the feeder station as their primary source of discs in teleop.
The top teams had intakes for autonomous mode, and many of those teams picked up off the floor in teleop, yes. But having a floor pickup instead of a human loader, with no autonomous, could actually make you a *less* effective scorer depending on the speed of your floor pickup and driver ability. I saw it many times this year - a team spends 20-30 seconds chasing 4 stray discs while a human loaded cycler runs home, gets 4, and runs back before the floor pickup is done.